Sure this plays as overly familiar, like A QUIET PLACE meets JURASSIC PARK -- but looks stylish and might be decent. Sam Raimi produces, the "Quiet Place" writers direct.

87-minute running time.

Superman IV ran 87 minutes too!

So did A Quiet Place (almost)...

That running time is a huge red flag. I mean, it's not 1945 -- how many awesome sub-90 minute movies have you seen that are recent to like the last 20 or 30 years?

Nothing wrong with being tight and wrapping it up under 2 hours. A Quiet Place was great, it was a visceral experience that didn't need to spell out character development. But even that was over 90 minutes, and I'd also argue it was a formula that works only one time. For me I needed more than a recycling when they did II, which I know you loved, but really felt tedious and repetitive for me.

Yet under 90 minutes isn't enough time to develop a satisfying level of dramatic or character development most of the time -- for most movies.

It's also typically the sign of a troubled movie that's been cut to shreds. Then consider this is an FX heavy movie that will have 10 minutes of credits -- meaning it's really like 80 minutes long. In the old days they'd throw a cartoon in front of that so people got their money's worth.

Not paying $$ to see that, no way. If I'm wrong and it's actually good, I'll invest my time -- in seeing it at home.

7.5/10

I greatly enjoyed this, a worthy update of those "lost world" B-pictures I grew up on like The Land That Time Forgot and The Last Dinosaur (they even throw in the rattlesnake chittering sound the Martian ships made in the original War Of The Worlds at one point, a nifty, retro auditory Easter Egg). It wastes NO time getting down to the basics of what people want in a movie like this (unlike the last Jurassic World picture, disastrously padded out to 146 minutes with who-asked-for-this subplots about LOCUSTS ). As a "Let's get from point 'A' to point 'B'" travelogue survival picture, it delivers the goods in taut suspense setpieces, solid F/X work and a fine score by Chris Bacon that has some pleasingly melodic string and woodwind flourishes amidst the obligatory, jangling action cues that are more coherently written-out than the usual Zimmer foghorn blats. Adam Driver holds the screen with his wiry charisma, and young Ariana Greenblatt holds her own as the young girl he's tasked in keeping safe from the marauding saurian threats that surround them (plus, she's an eerie ringer for a True Grit-era Hailee Steinfeld). It's not deep, but adding another half-hour to this would have just been unnecessary. It throws you right in, delivers the requisite thrills, and ejects you from the theater in 90 minutes flat, and in an era of genre bloat, that's tremendously refreshing. Shame it's gonna get bulldozed at the box office by Scream VI, but it's worth a trip for dino fans.

5/10

’A Quiet Place’ With Dinosaurs” is essentially how this spring release was sold to audiences, yet what’s on-screen in this dreary, unimpressive directorial outing from “Quiet Place” writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is more like “Jurassic Scraps.”

Over-reaching to an unintentionally comic degree at times, Adam Driver stars as an intergalactic traveler who ends up away from his family, crashed on a planet inhabited with dinosaurs. Whether or not the film was intended to be assembled and told in this manner, “65” tells us straight upfront that it’s Earth right before the meteorite crashed that wiped out most prehistoric life. Any surprise about these characters and their location is, therefore, no surprise to anyone, and the conventional, resulting chase film that ensues follows Driver and the only other survivor – a girl named Koa (Arianna Greenblatt) who only speaks a foreign language – as they attempt to find a rescue vehicle, separated from their downed craft, miles away in a landscape teeming with soon-to-be-extinct creatures.

“65” is an awfully odd movie in terms of how it relays its premise, which was explicitly spelled out in trailers and even an on-screen prologue here that feels like it was added to explain the movie to viewers. It’s particularly strange since there’s nothing left here that would confuse anyone, as “65” is little more than a hodgepodge of scenes, set-pieces, creatures and emotions cobbled together from other, much better films. Beck and Woods invert the pained sense of family loss seen in the “Quiet Place” movies, but all that does is result in making this film even more depressing than it needs to be – isn’t being stranded in a dinosaur-infected hell with little chance of escape bad enough? Instead the filmmaking duo continuously bring back Driver’s estranged – and ultimately deceased – daughter for appearances throughout the movie, making the actor have to single-handedly generate an emotional range that the thin story (told in a sub-90 minute run time minus credits) can’t support.

Understandably, Driver seems like he’s over-the-top at times, but at least something is, as the action scenes are so bland and boring – with CGI that’s nothing remarkable either – that they culminate in a movie that’s both overscored and overemoted –- the exact reverse of the genuine tension and sense of suspense “A Quiet Place” managed to generate.